Emmett Lazich49er Class National Coach for the Australian Sailing TeamDevelopment Director at Goalscape Software

Sydney 2000 was the first time I coached Olympic Gold Medal winning athletes. ThomasJohansonandJyrkiJärvifromFinland
won the 49er class event by a large margin. Back in 2000, I only
started working with those boys a few months before the Games.
Immediately after it was over, I reflected on what happened and
considered what it would take for anyone to reproduce that glorious
result.

Raw talent is a huge advantage in this sport; but victory in Olympic
sailing requires much more. Imagine a competitive environment where the
field of play is more dynamic and less predictable than your 25 other
human opponents. You and your partner are both piloting your craft: one
person steers, while the other works the engine throttle. If you do not
coordinate your body movements perfectly for any change in direction or
speed, you will slow down or even crash.

Even when you make all the right movements and decisions, if you are
inaccurate with the speed settings for your craft (initial set-up and
adjustments during the race), then you certainly ain't winning anything
on the big stage.

So proper preparation takes a lot of effort and attention to detail;
and this is not just a matter of ‘checking all the boxes’. Actually I
don’t believe it is possible to check all the boxes in sailing, since
there are far too many uncontrollables. Yet we certainly need some
methodical way to create order out of possible chaos.

So as a rookie coach in September 2000, I knew that a lot of
ingredients had fallen into place. I felt very fortunate to be a part of
Thomas and Jyrki’s victory.

I started coaching Nathan Outteridge in 2006; and from 2007 I was also working on what became the first truly solid version of Goalscape.

In January 2008, Nathan and crew Ben Austin won the 49er World Championship.
Then they came ever so close to winning Gold in the Beijing China
Olympics. People who compete at top level in annual sporting events
probably cannot truly comprehend the disappointment we felt, knowing
both the years we put in and that we had to work for another 4 years to
have another crack at it. We came away from that losing experience much
stronger and much wiser.

In August 2012, NathanOutteridgeandIainJensen
from Australia won the 49er class Olympic Gold medal. Again by a large
margin. And in the four years before the Games they had won 3 World
Championships (they were 2nd in the other one). For me as their coach
this was a totally different mission and journey.

In early 2009, Nathan teamed up with Iain. For the following 3½
years, our every plan, action and thought was considered in the context
of the London 2012 event. This is where Goalscape came to my personal
rescue.

Firstly, Goalscape allows me to define clear, simple philosophies and
strategies that enable me to stay focused and do all the important
things.

Secondly, everything significant that I must know or do is stored in a
Goalscape. Everything, in every different area in which we need to
excel.

Information overload is a big problem in this job. Goalscape helps me
stay on top of this: It is my visual index to knowledge, data, history
and essential performance related ingredients.

I cannot show you a real example of our campaign strategy goalscapes
because they are private and valuable intellectual property. Instead
here is an example goalscape that I use to help guide myself when I need
to make tough decisions. In the next week or two, I shall post a
followup blog outlining the simple process for creating a sport strategy
goalscape.

In 2009, the online project sharing function of Goalscape was not ready,
yet I desperately needed to share certain Goalscape projects with
Nathan and Iain. The obvious solution was for me to use Goalscape on
their behalf. I produced simple goal map views to help them to be
effective at dealing with the present, while maintaining awareness of
where they want to go. For the remainder of the campaign, we continued
to operate like this: using Goalscape for our high level performance
strategy and for tracking every little milestone in the 4 year Olympic
cycle. Below is a goalscape from Marcus showing progress made for one
category of skills.

When using a Goalscape view (of our high level strategy) as the basis
for periodic performance review meetings with team management and
support staff, a pleasant surprise was how brief and happy these
meetings were. We could complete our reviews in 45 minutes, while other
teams typically needed 2 or 3 hours. Follow-up work was quicker and
easier too. During the session I'd update the relevant goalscape or
goal, so the write-up was done instantly and everybody left the meeting
knowing what they had to do next.

After these meetings, I was occasionally told how highly organised we
were. That was such a lovely compliment considering that using
Goalscape felt like taking an easy shortcut.

Not all data or problems fit right into the Goalscape format. I still
make very extensive use of spreadsheets to store and crunch numbers for
quantitative work. And for short and/or sequential presentations,
slides work just fine.

I gravitate toward a clean visual structure. It is my primary
learning style for understanding, remembering and communicating complex
information. Obviously not everything is hierarchical; after using
Goalscape for a while though, it's surprising how often a hierarchical
structure does fit.

Today I'm making more use of Goalscape for presentations. I find it
works well when the subjected being taught is too big and/or the
discussions too dynamic for a set of sequential slides. With Goalscape
I'm better equiped to let audience feedback drive the session more, so I
focus better on what people want to learn.

Goalscape is still evolving. We are working on usability and
presentation enhancements, easier sharing of goals with new users and
accessing goals on tablets and other mobile devices. All of these
changes will increase Goalscape’s value – and of course cement it as a
key component in my coaching workflow.